


Gardening in Tropical Climates

by threeguesses



Category: The X-Files
Genre: F/M, Magical Realism, William-arc, post-IWTB
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-22
Updated: 2020-04-22
Packaged: 2021-03-02 05:27:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,512
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23779876
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/threeguesses/pseuds/threeguesses
Summary: "You can't have it all, Doctor Scully," the scarecrow tells her.  It is smoking a cigarette.  "There's always something you have to give up."
Relationships: Fox Mulder/Dana Scully
Comments: 2
Kudos: 18





	Gardening in Tropical Climates

**Author's Note:**

> Originally written in 2008.

There is a tiny house on the beach. It has white white walls and lizards that crawl across the floor and no one else for miles. Scully opens all the windows and the sun reaches into every corner.

“We’ll stay until you’re properly tanned,” Mulder announces, and Scully laughs and says “we’ll be here for years.”

There isn’t much furniture because there aren’t many rooms, just a kitchen and a bedroom and no running water for the bath. There’s a well in the jungle, and a winding path that leads to it. There’s the sky and the sun and the water and a tiny house at the edge of it all. Scully leans out the windows and surveys their domain.

The first time she fetches water from the well, what Scully notices is the silence. Away from the beach the light is underwater green, filtered through the trees, soupy and thick. She can’t hear the surf at all. She's less than a hundred feet from the shore.

Flowering vines droop over the sides of the well. They catch at Scully’s wrists as she bends to retrieve the bucket, pollen streaking across her palms. Her fingers are gritty against the bucket handle.

She returns to the house to find Mulder hanging wind chimes outside their bedroom window. “Of all the necessary items, _this_ is what you unpack first?” Scully wipes her yellow hands on her skirt.

“Shush, Scully,” he says, and leans back to admire his work. The chimes play a little tinkling song for the wind. Mulder grins.

Before they unpack further, Scully enlists Mulder’s help cleaning the house. There isn’t much to do. Scully squeezes four lemons into a bucket of water and together they run citrus soaked rags along the floors and walls. Halfway through Mulder decides that Scully’s toes need to be cleaned, and then her legs, and then she’s on her back on the sun-bleached floor. Everything smells like lemons and she licks the taste off Mulder’s skin.

(It’s only when Scully washes the rags out later that she notices they haven’t collected any dust.)

It’s hot, and it only gets hotter at night. They don’t unpack the sheets for three days. Instead Scully lies naked beside Mulder on the bare mattress and traces fingers down his spine. The chimes knock against the side of the house. A lizard watches from the wall.

They never unpack the clock.

After a week of nothing but reading on the beach and watching Mulder’s antics, Scully decides she needs a hobby. The stillness makes her claustrophobic, makes her hands cramp at night. 

Knitting is out, because she never learned and isn’t about to now and god, just the _thought_ of wool in this climate— So is anything that requires her to be out in the sun for long periods of time; her shoulders are already freckled and peeling. So she turns to her mother’s other tried and true pastime. Gardening. 

Scully’s gardened a little before, but that was in boxes with neat edges and trimmed plants. This climate is all wrong—too much heat and too much rain and too much sand. But somewhere by the well might work, she thinks, in the green light where plants won’t stand the risk of getting burned…

Clearing a patch is harder than it should be. The vines she’s working with look fragile, gossamer thin, but they tangle around her fingers when she tries to pull them out. By the time she’s finished her hands are completely torn up, deep scratches cut into the palms. 

The vines have no thorns.

Mulder rows her into the tiny town on the main island and she comes back clutching fistfuls of seeds. Radishes and lettuce, tomatoes and carrots, peppers and eggplants, as well as dill, tarragon, and thyme. The seeds don’t come in commercial packaging, but colourful cloth pouches fashioned out of old clothes; here is someone’s old party dress, someone’s favourite linen suit. Scully clutches them to her breast greedily. Mulder calls her Mary Lennox and drops a kiss on her nose.

It takes Scully three tries before her garden grows. 

The first time it’s washed away by a flash rainstorm. She and Mulder peep out the windows of their lemon house while the lightning flickers over the water, the electricity making the ends of Scully’s hair curl. When she checks on the garden the rain has pounded it into mud.

The second time all the seeds are pecked up by some unseen bird; Scully can make out the tiny tracks between the ravaged rows. Mulder helps her fashion a scarecrow but refuses to add string for hair; “I’m modeling it after Skinner,” he says. 

The third time takes. Scully counts the little green shoots each day until there are too many, and then keeps counting anyway. The vines are trying to grow back, to choke the tiny shoots, but Scully is having none of that. She’s learned to wrap her skirt around her hands before she pulls them out. 

Coming back to Mulder and the beach is like surfacing from underwater. Scully emerges blinking, shocked at the light and the air and the wind.

Her garden grows. It grows strangely, in fits and starts—inches a day, then nothing for a week—but it grows all the same. Mulder’s scarecrow grins from its place beside the new carrots. No wildlife has come since that first bird; the plants remain untouched and Scully never sees any tracks. She never hears any birdsongs.

The wind stays away too—if she tilts her head up she can just see it rattling the topmost leaves of the trees. 

Never any lower than that.

“Maybe we can just stay here,” Mulder murmurs into her skin.

“Maybe we can,” Scully says.

Sometimes after Scully has been out in the garden for a long time the heat starts to get to her—edges become shimmery, shapes blurring. The green light is like twilight; tricky, lighting some things and not others. From under the leafy canopy it becomes harder to track the sun’s path across the sky. Sometimes it appears to be shining from directions Scully knows it shouldn't.

She has started to have strange, fever dreams at night. She wakes up shaking and too warm. She dreams about blood and death and children crying. She dreams Emily is watching her from the armchair next to the bed, wearing a yellow dress. She dreams about William in a shopping mall, lost. She dreams about Mulder, about dreaming about nothing at all.

When this happens for the third night in a row, Scully gets up to find the clock. She wants to be able to count the hours left until morning. 

She checks through the boxes and all the suitcases. She searches the bathroom and the kitchen and finds nothing. Eventually she just lies awake in bed beside Mulder, sheets kicked off. 

It remains dark for an unnaturally long time.

(Sometimes after Scully has been out in the garden for a long time the heat starts to get to her—edges become shimmery, shapes blurring. The green light under the canopy is like twilight, lighting some things and not others. 

Sometimes she thinks the scarecrow moves, bobbing back and forth in no wind at all. Sometimes she thinks she hears William laughing.)

“You spend so much time in the garden,” Mulder says. He’s washing the dirt out from under her fingernails with lemon water. “I hardly ever see you.”

“Hmm,” Scully murmurs and leans a hip against him. “S’the only place with decent shade.”

The wind chimes tinkle softy outside the window.

One day when Scully is weeding she unearths an old baby bottle. She takes it to show Mulder, but when she looks down she’s holding a rock.

“You can’t have it all, Doctor Scully,” the scarecrow tells her. It is smoking a cigarette. “There’s always something you have to give up.”

The carrot leaves ripple in no wind. Soon it will be time to harvest them.

Scully picks the tomatoes first, laying their heavy bodies carefully in the basket. Then radishes, then the eggplant and the lettuce. The spices protest, releasing dying wafts of scent into the thick air.

She leaves the carrots for last. She’s let the weeds build up and the surrounding vines tear at her hands and tug at her skirt, like a child wanting to be picked up. The green light slants crazy shadows across the ruined garden. 

When she is done Scully picks up her basket. She walks past the well with its creeping flowers. She walks down the winding path and into the sunshine. She does not turn around.

She finds Mulder in the house. The walls are white and there is no one else for miles. All the windows are open and the light reaches every corner.

She says “We can’t stay.” 

She says “I want to go get him.” 

She says “Mulder, please Mulder, we have to go get him. Let’s go get him.”

Mulder reaches for her hand. “Yes,” he says. “Scully, yes.”


End file.
